We Counted the Skills in 360,000 Job Postings. AI Was the Most-Requested Hard Skill.

There's a lot of talk about AI reshaping hiring, so we checked it against our own data: 360,000+ job postings collected between December 27, 2025 and June 16, 2026, with skills extracted and standardized per posting. Here's what employers actually asked for.

The headline: "AI" is the #2 skill of any kind

"AI" appeared in 19.8% of all postings — the second most-requested skill overall, behind only communication (23.1%).

That puts it ahead of every individual language and platform: Python (18.6%), SQL (11.7%), AWS (11.3%), Java (10.5%).

In other words: AI is now the most-requested hard skill on the market.